Transfer, storage or retrieval of data can introduce accidental errors, and it is therefore important to develop methods for detection of such errors. For this purpose, various error detecting functions have been developed (for example checksums, cyclic redundancy checks (CRC) and hash functions) and are widely employed for validating and maintaining data integrity. Such functions typically take a block of data of arbitrary length and produce an integrity measure of particular data type and length (for example a 32-bit integer). The integrity of the data can be checked at any later time by re-computing the integrity measure and comparing with the previously calculated integrity measure. If the integrity measures do not match the data has been altered.
When data is purposely modified by truncation, the corresponding integrity measure is no longer valid. It is therefore necessary to recalculate the integrity measure for the truncated data, which requires re-reading of all data up to the point of truncation. In the case of large data files, this can be a costly and time consuming operation.
The problems associated with recalculating the integrity measure of data following truncation are particularly relevant to applications where data is stored in large sequential files (for example on tape media in a tape library or in a virtual tape library) containing typically several megabytes, gigabytes or even terabytes of data.
Features and advantages of embodiments of the invention will become apparent from the following description of preferred embodiments of the invention, given by way of example only, which is made with reference to the accompanying drawings.